“There is a state
of society to be formed by an extended
combination of institutions,
religious, civil and literary, which
never exists without
the co-operation of an educated ministry.”

Chas. Beecher, in his sermon at the dedication of
the Second Presbyterian church, Ft. Wayne, Ind.,
Feb. 22, 1846, said:—­

“Thus are the ministry of the
evangelical Protestant denominations not only
formed all the way up under a tremendous pressure of
merely human fear, but they live, and move, and
breathe, in a state of things radically corrupt,
and appealing every hour to every baser element
of their nature to hush up the truth and bow the knee
to the power of apostasy. Was not this the
way things went with Rome? Are we not living
her life over again? And what do we see just
ahead? Another general council! A world’s
convention! Evangelical Alliance and Universal
Creed.”

The Banner of Light of July 30, 1864, said:—­

“A system will be unfolded sooner
or later that will embrace in its folds Church
and State; for the object of the two should be one
and the same. The time is rapidly approaching
when the world will be startled by a voice that
shall say to every form of oppression and wrong,
‘Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.’
Old things are rapidly passing away in the religious
and social, as well as in the political, world.
Behold all things must be formed anew.”

The Church Advocate, in March, 1870, speaking
of the formation of an “Independent American
Catholic Church,” a movement now agitated in
this country, said:—­

“There is evidently
some secret power at work which may be
preparing the world
for great events in the near future.”

A Mr. Havens, in a speech delivered in New York, a
few years ago, said:—­

“For my own part I wait to see
the day when a Luther shall spring up in this
country who shall found a great American Catholic
church, instead of a great Roman Catholic church;
and who shall teach men that they can be good
Catholics without professing allegiance to a
pontiff on the other side of the Atlantic.”

There is every indication that at no distant day such
a church will be seen, not indeed, raised up through
the instrumentality of a Luther, but rather through
the operation of the same spirit that inspired a Fernando
Nunez or a Torquemada.